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Windows 7 Slowness

As a follow on to my Vista slowness thread, here is one about Windows 7.

My Dad has an HP laptop with Windows 7. I tried to use it today to set something up in Thunderbird. Thunderbird took ages to load up (well over a minute), but when it did finally load, it was nice and snappy. Likewise, Firefox took way too long to load.

From what I gathered by looking at the Task Manager, it looked like the machine had ample RAM for these programmes.

Any ideas? The one significant thing I did notice was that it appeared to have Trusteer Rapport installed, which is known to cause problems with system performance (or at least it was a few years ago when I last encountered it).

I'm surprised you found Firefox slow to load. I've recently installed it on my 'new' Pentium 4 laptop and it loads in under 10 seconds. It loads in under 5 seconds on my Linux box.

I have noticed the automatic updates thing on my other Windows box, but I only use that every couple of months, so I wasn't surprised at it wanting to update itself. On this laptop, I've disabled automatic updates completely in Options/Advanced/Update. Firefox on my Linux box doesn't even have the option to update, as it is installed from the Debian repository.

Does the slowness bother your dad? If not I'd recommend leaving it alone.

He acknowledges that it is too slow, but he seems to work round it by setting the machine loading something up, then going to make a cup of tea.